Stop! Ply Break

We interrupt your daily dose of Blendlings to give you a little plying.

This poor little single has been sitting on a bobbin for over three years, maybe more than four. It’s from the fabulous Cormo X that mom and I split One Hundred Years ago (i.e. May of 2012; Mom introduced it here). Mom actually bought me combs to process it, because she was enjoying combing so much. I tried to get into it, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t do a great job washing the fleece, anyway. We had a baby. Then another one. If spinning went on the back burner, fleece processing went on the back porch: the place hobbies go to die. I’m still not sure I’ll ever go back to it, and being half in-the-grease for all that time, it might be damaged by now. Can you tell I’m sad about it? I have a deep and abiding hatred of abandoning projects, even when I hate them!

For all that time, my first little bobbin of Cormo X sat on the bobbin. I didn’t love combing, but I loved spinning the rolags, so I had positive feelings toward it.

During the last couple weeks of rather intense spinning, I decided it was time to let it go.

The girlies helped me wind it into a center pull ball, when they weren’t trying to treadle. (N almost got it. She wants to spin and knit so badly. She is already a fierce crafter with her paint and coloring and glue and scissors and whatever else I let her make a mess with.)

You can see how incredibly rigid the singles are, after being stretched and greasy for all that time. It was almost like plying sticky strands of twine.

But, I had faith, and I was armed with new knowledge. I knew I could still scour the yarn; I knew I could put a lot of twist into it for strength and not worry too much about balance; I knew from sitting on the bobbin forever that it wasn’t going to look balanced until I washed the heck out of it anyway. And, I knew how woolen-spun yarn can bloom when you snap and thwack the heck out of it. And yes, most of this information came from the Wool N’ Spinning blog, which I rambled about at a previous break.

Pre-wash: this is what a skein looks like that has *all* of its expressed energy in the ply twist.

I executed these moves, and ended up with a downright tolerable little skein.

I scoured the living daylights out of it (about 20 plunges between HOT soapy water and cold rinse water), and it is a different yarn. Being woolen-spun, it’s not going to be strong – I even wonder if the fibers are damaged from all that time on the bobbin in the grease. It’s not soft either – I enjoy a toothy wool, but I’m not even sure I would want it on my head or hands.

I’m not sure what one can do with yarn that is neither tough nor soft nor enough for something large and utilitarian. I’m thinking about doing what I did with N’s Aviatrix and holding it together with some more leftover Kidsilk Haze, to make it a little more tolerable as a hat or mitts, for myself. Or maybe I’ll just add it to whatever I use the Blendlings for. I don’t know! Why do I always want to cast on my handspun right away???

UPDATE: Since I drafted this post, I have found this post on Diana Twiss’s blog on a Cormo fleece in the exact same condition! What a relief that the bag of Cormo X in Mom’s basement might not be a total loss… and that it might not matter if I wait another year or two to deal with it…